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Picon Architecturepublic.Pdf (49.77Kb) Architecture and public space: between reassurance and threat. The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Picon, Antoine. 2008. Architecture and public space: between reassurance and threat. Journal of Architectural Education 61, no.3: 6-12. Published Version doi:10.1111/j.1531-314X.2007.00164.x Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10977384 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ARCHITECTURE AND PUBLIC SPACE, BETWEEN REASSURANCE AND THREAT "We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others", 1 declared the French poet Paul Valéry shortly after the end of World War I in his essay La Crise de l'Esprit. In the aftermath of September 11th, architecture and urban design have been struck by a similar realization of the frailty of what they had tried to achieve from the very beginning of modernity: an environment that would contribute to the political and social pacification of the planet. For the attack against the World Trade Center meant that the twin towers were not interpreted as innocent symbols. Although they had been initially intended as a tribute to global prosperity, the terrorists targeted them as the epitome of a worldwide system of economical and cultural oppression2. This context should perhaps represent and incentive to reexamine the fundamental assumption lying behind architectural and urban practice, namely the intimate conviction that architectural and urban design are systematically on the side of order against disorder, looking for stability instead of instability, fostering peace rather than promoting conflict. Throughout the twentieth century, they were for sure exceptions to this state of mind. On the eve of World War I, the Italian Futurists had for example praised the aggressive side of Modernity, the beauty of industrialized conflict. Their leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had been especially adamant on that point in the founding manifesto of the movement in which one could read statements such as "Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece." 3 Later on, Fascist and Nazi architecture was clearly imbued with militaristic values. But the general trend was a quest for architectural and urban principles that would heal the social diseases of the time, enabling mankind 1 to get rid of war and riots. Le Corbusier was especially clear on that subject with his recurring alternative between architecture — a new and modern architecture for everyone — and the perspective of revolution and chaos. 4 History can perhaps be useful to distance oneself from the typically modern assumption of the possibility for architecture to be a pure instrument of betterment and progress. Even if one decides to leave aside episodes like Albert Speer's contribution to the Third Reich dreams of grandeur, can architecture be free from any violent dimension, in other words can it be totally innocent? A rapid tour in a more remote past shows indeed that architecture, as well as public space, have had often close ties with threat and violence. At certain moments of history, theses ties have not only concerned specialized domains like military architecture. Threat and violence have represented a broader source of inspiration for entire sectors of architectural and urban design. More generally, there is probably no architecture and public space without some relation with violence. Beyond the capacity of modernity to deceive itself on that point, the lesson to be drawn from these episodes could perhaps apply to some aspects of the present situation. ARCHITECTURE, THREAT AND VIOLENCE, FROM VITRUVIUS TO THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Contrary to the peaceful image that theorists have often tried to promote, threat and violence have been present in Western architecture almost from the start. After all, Vitruvius himself was an engineer versed in military matters. Beside the five orders and other fundamental developments on the architectural discipline, war techniques and engines are very present in his ten books on architecture. From the Renaissance, on, this military dimension was among the reasons that insured the success of his treatise among theorists and practitioners. Indeed, fortification was seen as a branch of the architectural discipline, a branch that influenced furthermore various other domains of architectural practice. 2 If one takes the example of French architecture, the influence of fortification is noticeable in many famous Renaissance and seventeenth-century buildings, from the gate of Philibert Delorme's castle of Anet that used forms typical of the bastioned system to Claude Perrault's Observatory with its sharp angles that played with the directions of the sun in a way somewhat reminiscent of the relation between fortified walls and projectiles 5. The relation between the latter building and the aggressive politics of domination led by King Louis XIV was made further evident by a comparison drawn by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his main minister, between the triumphal arch that Claude Perrault had designed to celebrate the military victories of the Sun King and the Observatory that was supposed to celebrate the scientific achievements of the French nation. "Triumphal arch for the terrestrial conquests – observatory for the skies", 6 noted the minister. According to him, the astronomic discoveries were clearly to be interpreted as an extension of the terrestrial conquests of his master. In seventeenth-century France, architecture was by no means an innocent practice. It has to do with power, military threat and conquest. The same was true of the formal gardens designed by Le Nôtre. They were also clearly related to fortification techniques and more generally to the military realm with their massive earthworks, reminiscent of the bastioned system and their well-ordered flowerbeds that seemed to parade like disciplined regiments. 7 Despite the changing social and artistic ideals that shaped eighteenth-century architectural production, the connection between architecture, threat and violence was to remain fundamental. Michel Foucault's analysis of the new panoptic scheme mobilized for hospitals or prisons, with its intricate blend of generous belief and disciplinary practices, is well known. Panoptic prisons were inspired by a desire to reeducate through surveillance and associated threat. Beyond the penitentiary realm, this kind of hybrid between social generosity, on the one hand, threat and violence, on the other, permeated an entire range of productions. Boullée's famous utopian compositions are thus constantly balancing between these two poles of Enlightenment political thought. Beside purely civilian programs like museums or assembly halls, the architect designed a series of city gates clearly permeated with the desire to "speak" an aggressive military language. 8 There are also striking similarities between the architectural vocabulary he tried to promote and the evolution of military 3 architecture around the same time. It is no hazard if General Marc René de Montalembert's forts that were to influence many later military realizations seem almost Boulléean in appearance with their simples and dramatic looking masses. 9 Despite the eighteenth-century aspiration at transforming society in order to avoid unnecessary conflicts, its architecture kept a complex balance between reassurance and threat. Generosity and threat were often present in the same project. Beside prisons, programs like courts of justice were especially suited to this alliance between the two dimensions, an alliance explored at a theoretical level by Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria. Published in 1764, Beccaria's highly influential treatise, On Crimes and Punishments, was permeated by the research of the proper type of sentence that would at the same time contribute to the redemption of the criminal and reassert the right of society to punish him severely. Many eighteenth-century projects for courts of justices positioned themselves within this frame. This was the case of Ledoux's proposal for Aix-en-Provence new court. 10 A contemporary student project of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, a civil engineering institution in which architecture occupied an important place, is even more explicit. 11 Whereas the marble stairs and the columns of the project speak of the majesty and generosity of justice, the cavernous openings in the basement that give light to the underground prison carry a definite threat. Nineteenth-century examples of this constant overlap between peaceful and more aggressive concerns are almost as easy to find. One must not forget in particular how the Gothic revival was rooted both in a social discourse exalting the liberty of the people and in racial considerations founded on the idea of an eternal struggle between nations and civilizations. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is typical of this connection between these two seemingly discrepant themes. Gothic was for him intimately linked to an urban civilization that he interpreted in terms of individual emancipation, and to a racial impulse, with definitely aggressive connotations, that could not be entirely rationalized. Even in his Reasoned Dictionary of Medieval architecture there is a dark side of Gothic in profound accordance with the tensions of nineteenth century culture. 12 This conflictual aspect is still traceable in Auguste 4 Choisy apparently more dispassionate history of architecture. Choisy's diagrams of the diffusion of the Gothic style describe a process very analogous to invasion and military conquest.13 That kind of ambiguity was probably lost with the Modern Movement quest for a purity of intention that architecture had never truly possessed in former times. Forgetting the dark side of reason, the modern architects and urbanists tried to construct a world in which conflicts would necessarily disappear at one point or another.
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